The Revolution Will Be Visualized

In the 1970s, it was the protest songs. In the 1980s, it was the anti-war movies. Today, the protest is no longer happening in songs or movies. Today, it’s online, based on data, and using visualization.

It’s a very abstract and yet very clear image: something moves along a trajectory, is suddenly stopped, and drops to the ground. A gun has been fired, somebody has been killed. Periscopic’s U.S. Gun Deaths visualization is visceral and it doesn’t just show data: it makes an argument. People are being robbed of their lives. Hundreds of years are lost every day.

In the deleted slides from his Tapestry talk, Jonathan Corum criticizes the visualization because there are elements that don’t mean anything. The filtered views also don’t work nearly as well as the initial animation. But the point is made there. It’s the impact, the punch in the guts that makes this work.

Pitch Interactive’s Out of Sight, Out of Mind shows U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. It breaks down the victims into high-profile targets, alleged combatants, civilians, and children. It’s essentially a stacked bar chart.

But the animation of the dropping bombs gives the strikes much more of a reality than a mere monthly number would. And the number of people killed is staggering when you see it as bars like that. These aren’t just bars, but they have segments, one for each person.

Switch to the Victims view and it gets even [...]